Hurricane Electric seems to have built their network by installing a router at every major peering point in the world, connecting each router to the local publi

Hurricane Electric seems to have built their network by installing a router at every major peering point in the world, connecting each router to the local public peering point switch, and then interconnecting those routers. If you want reasonably direct connections to all the world's tier 2 ISPs, Hurricane Electric seems to be an excellent way to get that, and as long as they're not charging too much, they may make actually showing up at the major peering switches yourself not worth the trouble when you can just be their customer and get connections to more peering points than you'd probably directly connect to yourself. Cogent has a fairly substantial network directly into random office buildings (though if you have an office in a random office building, it's almost certainly not one of the ones they've lit), and it's not clear to me that they do as good a job at peering with other networks as Hurricane Electric does.